Belligerents increasingly rely on media manipulation, propaganda, and communication to attain strategic advantages in conflict. Given the civilian propagandists’ clear role in creating tactical or strategic advantages for one side in the conflict, should these propagandists be considered combatants, and can they therefore be legitimately targeted because of their activities? This article overcomes traditional binary frameworks of distinction to argue that propagandists are indirectly participating civilians, i.e. participants who cannot be intentionally or directly killed in conflict. Because of their activities, propagandists, it argues, are liable to less-than-lethal harm, of which it identifies three types (destruction of property, privation of liberty, isolation). The article then proposes a necessary criterion – necessity – to decide if less-than-lethal harm is warranted against propagandists. It then creates four new criteria – denial of agency, falsehood, influence, gratification – to serve as assessment criteria able to decide what degree of harm a propagandist may maximally face. In making this argument, the article contributes to just war literature by proposing a novel way to evaluate the ethical status of a highly diverse, yet undoubtedly influential, category of war participants: those who undertake the ‘media battle’, outside of the military.

For $-1\leq B \lt A\leq 1$, let $\mathcal{C}(A,B)$ denote the class of normalized Janowski convex functions defined in the unit disk $\mathbb{D}:=\{z\in\mathbb{C}:|z| \lt 1\}$ that satisfy the subordination relation $1+zf''(z)/f'(z)\prec (1+Az)/(1+Bz)$. In the present article, we determine the sharp estimate of the Schwarzian norm for functions in the class $\mathcal{C}(A,B)$. The Dieudonné’s lemma which gives the exact region of variability for derivatives at a point of bounded functions, plays the key role in this study, and we also use this lemma to construct the extremal functions for the sharpness by a new method.

Let $f: M\rightarrow M$ be a $C^{1+\alpha }$ diffeomorphism on an $m_0$-dimensional compact smooth Riemannian manifold M and $\mu $ a hyperbolic ergodic f-invariant probability measure. This paper obtains an upper bound for the stable (unstable) pointwise dimension of $\mu $, which is given by the unique solution of an equation involving the sub-additive measure-theoretic pressure. If $\mu $ is a Sinai–Ruelle–Bowen (SRB) measure, then the Kaplan–Yorke conjecture is true under some additional conditions and the Lyapunov dimension of $\mu $ can be approximated gradually by the Hausdorff dimension of a sequence of hyperbolic sets $\{\Lambda _n\}_{n\geq 1}$. The limit behaviour of the Carathéodory singular dimension of $\Lambda _n$ on the unstable manifold with respect to the super-additive singular valued potential is also studied.

The rocky intertidal zone of sheltered shores in Breiðafjörður, north-west Iceland is dominated by monospecific stands of canopy-forming brown algae Ascophyllum nodosum, which provide habitat for mobile organisms and has been subjected to long-standing rotational harvesting. We investigated the assemblage composition of little-studied mobile brachyuran crabs in this area, to track distributional shifts in a native species responding to climate change and extent of occupancy of the intertidal by a primarily subtidal invasive non-native species. Potential interactive effects of seaweed harvesting were explored. Breiðafjörður was compared with two reference sites in Faxaflói, south-west Iceland. The study revealed clear poleward expansion of the native European green crab Carcinus maenas in the region, displacing the native spider crab Hyas araneus particularly at mid-shore levels. The invasive non-native Atlantic rock crab Cancer irroratus had negligible occupancy in the intertidal zone, indicating limited effects on the intertidal crab assemblage, composition, and abundance. The current harvesting regime of A. nodosum in Breiðafjörður did not affect the composition and abundance of the brachyuran crab assemblage in the rocky intertidal zone. H. araneus is likely being squeezed by displacement subtidally by C. irroratus, and intertidally by C. maenas. Overall, we provide insights into the potential interactions between climate change, invasive species, and human activities in the rocky intertidal zone.

In this article, Steven Medema provides some reflections on his tenure as editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (1999 – 2008). This was a time of significant transition in the life of the journal, and the successful navigation of this period provides an excellent illustration of how much an editor and a journal rely on the assistance and support of both key individuals and the broader community of scholars in the field.

The aerodynamic performance of a wing model with a row of distributed engines are investigated at the vertical take-off condition. The engines are installed near the trailing edge of the wing. During vertical take-off, the jets exit from the engines and impinge perpendicularly to the ground, providing a thrust for the aircraft. Due to the ground effects, complex vortex structures are induced by the jets. The vortices are categorised into the spanwise vortices and the chordwise vortices. The underwing vortices can lead to low-pressure regions on the lower surface of the wing, resulting in an undesirable downward force. The underwing vortex structures are affected by the ratio of the engine distance to the engine diameter ($S/D$). At a small $S/D$ = 1.10, the flow field is dominated by the spanwise vortices; at a large $S/D$ = 2.78, the flow field is dominated by the chordwise vortices. The range and strength of the spanwise vortices are affected by the vortices interaction. Competition mechanism exists between the range and strength effects, which results in the non-linear variation of the wing lift coefficient with engine spacing. The details of the flow physics underneath the wing and its mechanism on the lift of the wing during take-off are investigated.

This article analyses how wealthy men and women manipulated citizenship regimes during and after the Habsburg Empire to access the family laws most convenient for their private lives. To do this, I compare migratory divorce practices in pre-1918 Habsburg Hungary and the post-1918 Free State of Fiume. This article shows that while before 1918 it was mercenary actors who utilised legal loopholes between Austrian and Hungarian family laws and citizenship regulations to obtain divorces for the rich, after 1918 it was the impoverished, globally-isolated, mercenary postimperial state that procured the means for rich clients to buy their way out of their own state's family laws, raising questions about the relationship between the early twentieth-century postimperial world of globally dependent European successor states with today's postcolonial ‘golden passport’ system.

We propose a flexible lattice model to evaluate the fair value of insurance contracts embedding both financial and actuarial risk factors. Flexibility relies on the ability of the model to manage different specifications of the correlated processes governing interest rate, mortality, and fund dynamics, thus allowing the insurer to make the most appropriate choices. The model is also able to handle additional guarantees like a surrender opportunity for which explicit formulae are not available being it similar to an American derivative. The model discretizes mortality and interest rate dynamics through two different binomial lattices and then combines them into a bivariate tree characterized by the presence of four branches for each node. The probability of each branch is defined to replicate the correlation affecting the two processes. The bivariate model is useful to compute the value of survival zero coupon bond. When adding another source of risk, such as the fund dynamics for evaluating fund-linked insurance products, we model it through a bivariate tree that captures the influence of the interest rate on its drift term. Then, the mortality risk is embedded by defining a trivariate tree presenting eight branches emanating from each node with probabilities defined in order to capture the correlations of the processes. Extensive numerical experiments assess the model accuracy by considering some stylized policies, but the model application is not limited to them being it able to manage different contract specifications.